34 Goudey variation 1/1?
 

Hi Everyone, new member Jack here. I collect 14 cracker jacks, 34 Goudey, 50, 53, 55 Bowman, and 54 Wilson Franks. I have a question about a 34 Goudey I picked up. I came across the pictured George Watkins 34 Goudey on EBay listed by a big (the biggest?) dealer. It has a white background vs the typical yellow background. Looks like the printer probably ran out of yellow ink. I tried to do some digging and all I could find about the card was a blog post from 2011 by the dealer in question about the card. I called the dealer and they said they had never seen another one which says a lot because they have millions of cards in inventory. It is differentiated on the SGC pop report and is a pop 1. I am curious if anyone has ever seen another example of this variation. It’s possible there are raw versions out there. Also possible that PSA just doesn’t differentiate the variation on the pop report but has graded them before, impossible to know though. Thanks!

This is very similar to my Goudey Proofs from the 33 set. We should talk. Attachment 651535


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Wow...nice Goudey proofs AbeCurry! All of your "white" ones appear to be mostly just that color. I do notice that the 1934 Goudey Watkins the original poster shared has what appears to be normal coloration on his face and cap, as well as the angled bar at bottom. I seem to remember that there are proof Goudey cards out there that display different progressions of the printing process. Would this Watkins be an example of a card further along the printing process?

Brian (asking for a friend of someone else's friend)

Those proofs are so cool, had never seen one until I started reading threads on here actually. I had the same thought as Brian when you mentioned the proofs. There aren’t 33 proofs that have the same characteristics as this Watkins (with only background color missing), but maybe they did proofs different in 34. Another interesting point is that SGC only assigns authentic grades to the proofs, while this Watkins got a numerical grade.

The printing process usually goes yellow, magenta, cyan, then black so my assumption is that this somehow missed either the first station or the roller ran out of ink for this card. It would be interesting to look at the sheet order. I’ll start doing some research and let you know what I find.


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I do not know how exactly how variation is defined... I mean in hobby parlance .... I can look it up and know how to use the word is spoken and written English....
Anyone care to explain whether this is a "variation" in hobby terms?
I'm not sure if this qualifies.

Thanks AbeCurry, I’d be very interested. And to your point Misunderestimated, I realized shortly after starting the thread that variation wasn’t the right word to use. Assuming it’s a result of a lack of ink in the printer, I guess the word to use would be error.

Sorry didn't mean to be so snarky...

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Welcome to the sub Jack and...

Holy crap Abe!

Maybe
 

Not trying to be a wet blanket here...... but Ive seen other cards (specifically 1958 Topps) where it looks like the yellow was missed (greens turning to blue, yellow looks white) and it was the result of prolonged sun exposure bleaching out the yellow. Im not saying your card had this but it makes me wonder.... no matter what, its sure different looking. Cool card.

Rocky, I found a thread on here with a picture of a 58 Topps Bob Anderson with a completely white background, can’t even tell there was ever any yellow ink. You could be right in that it’s fading. If that’s the case it seems amazing to me that it could fade to the point of there being no sign the yellow ink was ever there. Thanks for the info.

Cool
 

Out of my wheelhouse guys but those are cool...Jerry

The more I think about it the more I’m convinced that what Rocky said is what’s going on here, and that it’s due to fading. If the yellow was absent from the printer, the color of his face, which would need some yellow ink in order to get right, would be completely off and would probably look blue/purple. I think I’m considering this a closed case. Thanks again for everyone’s thoughts.

Setting in the sun too long was also the first thing that came to mind. There are a few big sellers that are total scum that sell faded cards as rare error cards. One has had a never ending supply of the sun faded 1958 Blue Hank Aaron cards for decades.

No dig on the seller in my case since SGC slabbed the card as a “white background” error. Now I wonder if it is a pop 1 just because SGC realized eventually that it’s a faded card and they no longer make the distinction.

Yours in an old flip. They no longer put stuff like "White Background" on a card like that. I know it has been several years. I sent in a real missing yellow Roberto Clemente and they never noted it on the flip. I did request it but they said no they no longer did that anymore. All the grading companies got burned with faded cards years ago so I don't believe any note it anymore.

Any chance you can post a high resolution scan? My knowledge of errors is primarily teens and back, but this seems to me like it might actually be missing the yellow. I wouldn't assume that the skin tone had yellow in it (though it might). I'd like to see the logo on the hat a bit better. Given how many Goudeys are out there, if this were due to sun fading I would think we would have seen lots of similar examples (for example, I have a ton of examples of T206 with sun fading) but I don't recall seeing another.

If it was fading, wouldn't the angled blue banner (that contains Lou's signature) have faded some as well? It still seems to have fairly bold blue coloration.

It would be nice to see a little better image of this card.


Brian

Well dang it all if I just didn't spot this 14 year old article on the Sports Collector's Daily website that discusses this very card.

https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...ba-photo-deal/

And below is the photo from the article.

Brian

From my collection
 

I bought this “white” card at a show from a dealers commons 20 or so years ago…. it just didn’t look right to me so got it for a dollar or about that. Is it a real missing yellow card or is it sun faded??? I would also say none of his other cards looked like that….. it was the only one…

It really varies greatly by year/manufacturer on how each ink color fades. 99.9% of the time I can easily tell in hand. Almost always a faded card just looks duller overall next to a normal card. Then you look at it under a top lighted microscope you know for sure.

That is a 1958 Topps and that year the yellow color almost fell off them. Seriously they are famously easy to fade the yellow of off.

This one is full sun faded from extensive exposure.





Yellow to white and green to blue are probably the easiest to make. You can take a yellow card and remove the yellow pretty quickly with nothing but light. It's not too difficult to not effect the other colors, even by honest accidental fading that wasn't done by a person trying to make and sell a fake error.

I actually like these cards, even though its just damage 99% of the time you see a yellow-to-white. Still looks cool.

Bryan, that’s another point that has me still not quite sure. This set has plenty of yellow background cards, is 111 years old, and yet I’ve never seen another example of a card missing its background color. This is in contrast to the 58 Topps set where it seems fairly easy to find examples of cards affected by fading. I’d love to upload a higher resolution image but I’m brand new here, and when I made the original post I compressed the file size because it looked like the maximum file size was ~195KB. Any guidance on how to do that would be much appreciated.

I copied and saved and cropped and reduced the image size, which I think makes it clearer. I still don't think the card looks like this due to fading, and I can't imagine the blue at the bottom would still be so bold if the sun had supposedly leached out the yellow background to the point of it being white.

I have posted that 14 year old photo again because it provides a nice, less glare image (curse those plastic slabs, and even those card sleeves) and provides a fair contrast of the white background to the cards typical yellow background. In my eyes the blue in the white background version (bottom, uniform lettering, and even perhaps the hat) appears darker than the blue in the regular yellow background card example shown.

Brian (by the way, not my thumbnails nor fingers)

Missing color passes are like t206 wagners...not genuine unless proven otherwise (to me). Sun, water, chemicals, age...all impact pigments differently. It's much more likely on any "missing color" card that it has some after issue damage. Having never seen a goudey that missed a color pass and having seen hundreds of cards where something impacted one or more colors, I tend to think it's probably the latter rather than the former. Not to say it isn't a curiosity...and I hope you enjoy it.

This is a real missing yellow card. See how the rest of the colors still pop. They are not dull in any way. It is actually one of the best looking most vibrantly colored version of this card I have seen. It is amazing looking in hand. Also with a top lighted microscope you will still find yellow on a real missing yellow and faded card. The faded card will have dull dirty looking yellow. The real missing yellow card can and usually will have a very small amount of yellow but it will be a bright shiny yellow.

I enjoy hearing everyone’s opinions and thoughts. I decided to snag a cheap decent looking raw copy off of eBay to run some experiments. Will update with relevant results in the future if there are any.

Doesn't it make sense on Rocky's 58T Williams card that since the color at the bottom behind team name and position is different prove that yellow was never printed on the card?

I don't think sun fading would turn that from green to blue.

Actually that is exactly what sun fading does. Just look at the never ending supply of Blue 1958 Hank Aaron cards one extremely dishonest seller has had for decades.

If it's a warm sunny summer, will there be a hoard of '34 Goudey's tanning at the beach?:eek:

Green is easily turned into blue, with nothing but light.

If too much light (or other factors beyond quantity), colors beyond yellow-to-white and green-to-blue get dulled. Attached is an example, the bottom of the card on top was covered with a book, and the rest of the card hit with a certain kind of light. We can see the image is dulled out and washed out, because I hit it with a lot of light for a longer time, to illustrate the effect.

One can easily create a version that does not dull the other colors but using more moderate light and/or different light sources. These can happen for non-nefarious reasons too, for example a card left on display and exposed to light of the right brightness range for long enough, but some scammers have been making cards like this for awhile to sell as 'errors'. These undulled or less dull cards are often incorrectly believed to be 'legitimate'.

Yellow to white, green to blue, and for tobacco cards red to orange are the easiest color changes to have happen through honest exposure or through nefarious means intending to defraud. All can be made pretty quickly at home. The most problematic of these are probably the 1969 Topps white letter Mantle's. There is a true printing variation, with his last name in yellow or in white, with white being rare. However, you can pretty easily just remove the yellow in that area and make one at home.


Glues can create much weirder combinations and color problems, which are also often passed off as legitimate printing errors, but really are not. A majority of color-based printing errors are not errors and did not leave the factory that way.